Firefox 2.0.0.19 losing Antiphishing Protection

I first reported with the Mozilla Project Weekly Status: December 1st, the upcoming Firefox 2.0.0.19 release is not going to have the Antiphishing Protection that was introduced with Firefox 2 back in 2006. According to an article on Computerworld Security, the feature is being remove by Google’s request because the older browser line uses an obsolete protocol.

“The Phishing Protection feature in Firefox 2 relies on data provided by Google via the first version of the SafeBrowsing protocol,” said Beltzner, who explained that Google and Mozilla had worked together to update the protocol, first to SafeBrowsing v2.1 late last year, and more recently, to SafeBrowsing v2.2.

“Now that Firefox 2 is reaching the end of its support life span, we have been asked to turn this feature off as Google will no longer be supporting requests using the obsolete SafeBrowsing v1 protocol,” said Beltzner.

Another good reason (besides no more updates) Firefox 2 users should migrate to Firefox 3.